Andrew Stanton’s line, “The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.” stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it almost a year ago.

I was on my way to working with a couple of teachers in another area of Quebec and had a long drive ahead of me, so I plugged in my phone and listened to a podcast I had been saving for just such an opportunity – from NPRs TED Radio Hour, Framing the Story. Listen to it to hear what Andrew says about storytelling.

~~

Grant Wiggins writes:

…a course must seem coherent and meaningful from the learner’s perspective. There must be a narrative, if you will; there must be a throughline; there must be engaging and stimulating inquiries and performances that provide direction, priorities, and incentives. (What is a course?)

This is true at any level, in any industry. Whether working with students or professionals – learning will happen, learning will be meaningful – when I care about the story you have to tell and can fold it into my own.

Make me care – say all learners to all teachers.

When they are skipping class, doing the minimum to pass, avoiding work, avoiding professional development opportunities – somehow we have not made our material something they care about. Sometimes it is beyond our control – other stories in their lives have prominence.

For me, I strive to make you care about what I have to teach.

~~

The truth about stories are that that’s what we are ~ Thomas King

~~

(Oh – and to my students – you don’t need to make me care. I already do.)

Blogging is not about making journaling fun for students.
It’s not about trying to find a reason for students to spell correctly.
It’s not even about connecting them to global others.

I can think of no more horrible an exercise than forcing all of the students in my class to create a blog for the sake of writing online what could be written in a journal. For the sake of trying to trick them into writing with the flashy, shiny technology as if they won’t know that really all they are doing is writing on a computer (I did it about 5 or 10 years ago, so I know of what I speak).

If blogging is a something (and I think it is) then it’s about having a passion to share. It’s about loving something so much you want to write, talk, show – create – about it. It’s about having a story to tell. It’s about having a voice.

Inherent in my job as a teacher is showing my students to their voice. For some, blogging could be a good vehicle for that trip.

The secret for me is to get them to that voice in a way that makes sense for them.

A number of years ago I listened to Thomas King as he gave the keynote address at a teacher’s convention. He said something along the lines of – “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are…We are responsible not only for the stories we tell but for those we choose to believe.”

So what do these stories tell us about their storytellers?

And which do you choose to believe? Remember. Only you are responsible for that.

]]>http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2013/10/28/truth-about-stories/feed/0Flashback: seeking to understandhttp://leadingfromtheheart.org/2013/05/11/flashback-seeking-to-understand/
http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2013/05/11/flashback-seeking-to-understand/#commentsSat, 11 May 2013 14:13:19 +0000http://leadingfromtheheart.org/?p=2475This post was originally written in 2009 and is still very relevant to me. I hope you think so as well.

—

If only humans had it this easy when it comes to understanding each other

A norm that I aspire to, however difficult it can be at times is this one:

“In a few minutes, he got the idea that I wasn’t there to make his day more miserable but that I was genuinely trying to understand him.”

She described the encounter between herself and the child as magical. I felt the magic as I read her words. Karen is a true leader. Go read the whole story. It’s a story worth listening to, sharing, and believing.

“We are responsible not only for the stories we tell and the stories we listen to, but for the stories we choose to believe.” ~Thomas King

]]>http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2013/05/11/flashback-seeking-to-understand/feed/0Let me tell you a story … about teaching and technologyhttp://leadingfromtheheart.org/2012/04/20/let-me-tell-you-a-story-about-teaching-and-technology/
http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2012/04/20/let-me-tell-you-a-story-about-teaching-and-technology/#commentsFri, 20 Apr 2012 14:49:11 +0000http://leadingfromtheheart.org/?p=2090I’m teaching a class on creating a radio show and podcasting. I’m working with 11 enthusiastic and interested adult learners and I’m quite excited about it myself. Yesterday was our 2nd meeting.

Let me tell you a little story about teaching and technology…

My plan was 3-fold:

Talk about commitment to the course
Each person to choose which part of the show they would be working on (basically create work groups)
Begin some research

The first two parts were easy, the components were me and them. It was the last section that proved…challenging. And guess what? That last section involved a 10 minute presentation. It required technology. And the technology wasn’t cooperating. I realized it wasn’t cooperating an hour before the course so I did have time to place the presentation on individual laptops for students to view at their tables. The thing was, I wasn’t planning on needing headsets. There was audio. At one point in the presentation I say, “You must be fed up of hearing my voice by now …” When I heard it an asynchronous 6 times I laughed out loud and so did the students. It’s a good thing they have a sense of humour!

Other little things… laptops kept logging out (need to remember to shut off the logout feature) during the class, some of them decided to do the Windows update thing and re-started mid lesson.

Like I said, at least we all had a sense of humour and I knew what was going on nevertheless it was still very frustrating. I had spent a week preparing for this class, not a week straight but on and off for a week. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and it really should have gone off without a hitch but it didn’t.

And. Capital A ‘And’ here… I am a technology consultant. I understand that things sometimes don’t work and the majority of the time I can work around that And still, I was met with this frustration.

When teachers tell me their own stories of how technology trumped their lessons I know that they are less and less willing to try it again. It is frustrating to put so much time into something to have it fall apart because a wire is missing, a network is down, a button they don’t know about needs to be pushed, an ActiveX control needs to be allowed to run, a program needs to be updated, a this, a that.

So where do we go from here?

Is it about teaching teachers how to troubleshoot all of that? It would be nice if everyone knew how but I’m not sure if that is a very practical answer.

The largest protest I hear from teachers about their day is that there is not enough time to do anything. We know that there isn’t. Teachers have so many responsibilities, a mere fraction of which is the hours of time where they are physically tied to their classrooms and the rest generally gets done on their own time. We know that. So throwing more training at them that requires them to use their precious out of class time in order to learn how to troubleshoot technology that they perhaps do not even want to use well…I think that is problematic.

So again. Where do we go from here?

For myself, I am in the process of creating a webpage for the course where I will drop any resources. I’ll be expecting the learners in the course to access any presentations there. It’s something they can do during class time, at home if they have computers, on their phones, whatever their preference or requirement. This way the theory won’t be trumped by the tech. As well, the class time will be reserved for collaboration, creation, and questions.

But that is me. I teach one little course a week. And I am a technology consultant.

Where do we go from here when it comes to working with educators and supporting them with not only the opportunities but the challenges of using technology in the classroom?

]]>http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2012/04/20/let-me-tell-you-a-story-about-teaching-and-technology/feed/0Funny story about making educational videohttp://leadingfromtheheart.org/2012/04/16/funny-story-about-making-educational-video/
http://leadingfromtheheart.org/2012/04/16/funny-story-about-making-educational-video/#commentsTue, 17 Apr 2012 01:28:50 +0000http://leadingfromtheheart.org/?p=2088I know what makes a boring, didactically challenged video. I even spent some time not two weeks ago talking about this, analyzing this with other educators.

And yet, today I struggled with creating a video (multimedia presentation…actually glorified powerpoint, whatever) that didn’t fall into that description. The presentation is just a little thing but I still feel there is too much text, that it’s not dynamic enough, that it is just…dull.

And it took me more than a few minutes to create. Many more.

So if I had such difficulty and I am aware of what not to do. And I have a desire to create the video. And I have some time in which to do so as part of my job…imagine how daunting the task of creating relevant, didactically charged video would be for educators who don’t have those luxuries.

Scarier thought…wonder what their classrooms look like unplugged, so to speak.

When I was 5 years old I changed my name to Harmonica Goldfish. The motivation behind that is still a bit unclear but the context was that my family had just moved to Manhattan and I spontaneously told the new children I met at the park in front of our apartment building that my name was Harmonica Goldfish.

Once the laughter subsided as children started knocking on our door asking for Harmonica Goldfish, my mother convinced me I should change my name to Patricia instead, since that was actually (and still is actually) my full name. That my new teachers would call me that but may not call me Harmonica Goldfish. I accepted that and was known as Patricia when I started school.

Most people call me Tracy now so sometime between 1973 and now I reverted back to Tracy. I imagine things gradually shifted back towards Tracy during the year…or at least when we moved back to Montreal the following year, when the reason for our year in New York – my father’s fellowship with Cornell University – had come to an end.

At one point in my 30s I worked at a school where everyone called me Patricia for about 5 years. Don’t quite remember how that happened. Towards the end of that same period I began and completed a Masters program, where people called me Patricia. Gradually, by the end of the 2-year program, I think I began to be known as Tracy again.

This little story of my changing name makes me think of the line, “no matter where you go, there you are.” I could try to mark a new start somewhere with the changing of a name but when it comes down to it, I am Tracy. I am me. And with that comes all of the qualities that brought me to where I am now – mainly a strong desire to create hope for the future through education. A tenacity when it comes to an idea that I believe fosters that hope.

When I see my life as a story, with all the richness and depth of art, the beauty and serendipity and redemption, the synchronicity of forces beyond my knowing, I understand finally that I am not necessarily the author.